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‘Vengeance is Mine’ by Marie NDiaye (2021) – 226 pages                 Translated from the French by Jordan Stump

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There are two plot lines to the French novel ‘Vengeance is Mine’.

One plot line is the aftermath of a horrendous act: a mother, Marlyne Principaux, admits that she has murdered her three little children, Jason, John, and Julia. Jason is 6 years old, John is 4 years old, and Julia is 6 months old. The mother drowned them in the bathtub. The mother’s husband Gilles is very supportive of his wife when the police come to question them. He hires the female lawyer M. Susane, who is at the center of this novel, to defend his wife.

“Principaux would be judged excessively loyal to Marlyne, so much so that he would be accused of duplicity, of supporting his wife for his own ends.

“It was simply that Principaux didn’t seem “emotional” enough.”

The second plot line concerns the lawyer M. Susane’s housekeeper Sharon. Sharon who is from the Indian Ocean island country of Mauritius and is undocumented. If the authorities found out that she is undocumented, they could send her back to Mauritius at any time. The lawyer M. Susane wants to help her get the necessary marriage certificate documents from Sharon’s sister, but Sharon resists. M. Susane tries to be helpful to Sharon in every way, but Sharon seems to reject her at every turn.

“The mere thought of offending Sharon horrified her.”

Both of these plot lines are quite straightforward, and the first half of the novel is easy to follow and understand, perhaps too easy.

However the novel takes a turn in the second half that is hard to follow. M. Susane has what amounts to a nervous breakdown and is plagued with self-doubt about her entire circumstances.

“Her memory of the few weeks Rudy and Sharon had spent caring for her was hazy, but she recalled with almost infuriating precision her desperate return home after leaving her office, locking the door, and telling herself she would never go back, that she had none of the qualities of a respectable lawyer, that even her parents, the only people on earth who loved her unconditionally, were now passing the cruelest but surely the most accurate judgment on her; she’d failed in every way.

There was no one she hadn’t let down.”

I don’t believe that Marie NDiaye adequately prepared her readers for this radical change to the plot. It’s like Ndiaye realized her original plots were not deep enough, so she tried something else.

I was disappointed with the ending, because it didn’t seem to answer any of the questions that the two earlier main plot streams naturally raised. To me, the ending did not fit what had happened before. The ending is unclear, murky. Neither plot line is given a satisfying conclusion. Instead we seem to be dealing with a main character who is falling apart.

I much preferred Marie NDiaye’s earlier work, ‘Three Strong Women’, to ‘Vengeance is Mine’. The plots of the three novellas in ‘Three Strong Women’, if not as dramatic, are much more relatable.

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Grade:    B